Few-cycle attosecond pulse chirp effects on asymmetries in ionized electron momentum distributions

Authors

Liang-You Peng, Department of Physics and State Key Laboratory for Mesoscopic Physics, Peking University, BeijingFollow
Fang Tan, Department of Physics and State Key Laboratory for Mesoscopic Physics, Peking University, Beijing
Qihuang Gong, Department of Physics and State Key Laboratory for Mesoscopic Physics, Peking University, BeijingFollow
Evgeny A. Pronin, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Anthony F. Starace, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

7-20-2009

Comments

Published in Physical Review A 80, 013407 (2009); doi: 10.1103/PhysRevA.80.013407 Copyright © 2009 The American Physical Society. Used by permission.

Abstract

The momentum distributions of electrons ionized from H atoms by chirped few-cycle attosecond pulses are investigated by numerically solving the time-dependent Schrödinger equation. The central carrier frequency of the pulse is chosen to be 25 eV, which is well above the ionization threshold. The asymmetry (or difference) in the yield of electrons ionized along and opposite to the direction of linear laser polarization is found to be very sensitive to the pulse chirp (for pulses with fixed carrier-envelope phase), both for a fixed electron energy and for the energy-integrated yield. In particular, the larger the pulse chirp, the larger the number of times the asymmetry changes sign as a function of ionized electron energy. For a fixed chirp, the ionized electron asymmetry is found to be sensitive also to the carrier-envelope phase of the few-cycle pulse.